If this is your first visit, be sure to
check out the FAQ by clicking the
link above. You may have to register
before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. To start viewing messages,
select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below.

This week has been a lot better than the last two weeks, the snow has finally gone, it is icy in parts and this evening it started to rain, the wind has got up and the weather reports severe gale warnings, my car nearly got blown off the road this afternoon due to the strong wind.
The temp outside at the moment is : L3° H8°, cold all the same.

The real art of conversation is not only saying the right thing at the right moment but also to leave unsaid the wrong thing at the most tempting moment. -- unknown

About an inch of snow on the ground, the weatherman (who has been wrong before) is calling for freezing rain. On weather.com, we show as just above the band of pink freezing rain down in southern Illinois; we're keeping our fingers crossed that it stays in Carbondale , and that the bigger pink blob currently over Iowa stays on their side of the Mississippi.

Still, I went out and bought a gallon of milk this morning, and checked the freezer--if we have a full-tilt-boogie ice storm and the power goes out, stuff stays frozen longer if it's full.

Yup. It's full.

Two years ago, during the Great Ice Storm of '06, our power was out for 10 days. I still have a tote full of candles down in the basement.

I left Coastal California to beat one storm and got caught in another. Since I am traveling I will just say...well, I'll try not to hijack this thread so I'll start one with the story elsewhere. How the weather relates though, is this:

I beat the storm that came in off the coast and snowed the Sierras in. I got across the pass just as it started raining.

I got to central Nevada just as...we'll say this: By the time I got to Laramie, WY about 1,000 miles (1600 km) later, 400 miles were spent in driving snow, another 400 in high wind gusts (60mph/100km), and enough ice to make big bad truck drivers admit to peeing their pants. And then my heater went out...(I'm now in Michigan)

This is the same storm that snowed in Seattle and Vegas and set record lows in several places.

Last edited by man on the moon; 2008-Dec-19 at 05:21 AM.
Reason: to correct my tenses

In this curious country of the UK, petrol is sold in litres, but roads are measured in miles. Ideally fuel consumption should be published in miles per litre, but it always given as either mile per (uk) gallon or litres per 100km. The facts of the measuring devices availablt to me mean that I find it hard to take much in knowing how many litres of petrol (well diesel really) my car needs to go 62.15 miles, nor how many miles I can go on 4.5 litres.

Whilst we do seem to be stuck with miles in this country, I do wish we'd go the whole way given that everything else (apart from glasses of beer aside) is in metres, kg and litres.

The US's stickiness for measuring temps in Frankenstein and selling hog bellies in bushels and the like is remarkably short-sighted. The rest of the world is watching, and laughing, so do us the favour of providing a translation. After all, you need to understand the international method whenever you go abroad, or send space ships to Mars, so you ought to be good at the translation. And even when you do do metric, you often do it in cgs which is not SI (systeme internationale) and that gives you obscure units like dynes and ergs. 1 unit (kWh) of electricity, which costs about GBP0.10, is 360000000000000 ergs, isn't that convenient.

Meanwhile, we have a nice sunny day in London. It's 7C, which is much more like normal for December than the cold weather we had the last two or three weeks when it has barely crept above 4C. Tomorrow the forecast is for 13C and sunny intervals. I might have to abandon this Icelandic jumper I've been wearing the last three weeks. That's unusual, because more normally when the temp is in the mid-teens in midwinter in London, it's because we have weather system coming in from the SW off the Atlantic and it's wet and windy. In fact whenever we have such a weather system coming in from the SW, the temp is usually in the mid-teens summer or winter.